Data Center Construction Boom: An Ominous Sign for Medical Freedom and the Coming Surveillance Grid

Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF) embraces the use of information technology, when used as an emancipatory tool to guide one’s own health choices—a person can use technology to collect and analyze their own health data or to garner insights on the best way forward for their health journey. However, HFDF is also acutely aware of the danger that centralized control of many new health information technologies, and consolidated control over health data, poses for health freedom, patient privacy, and individual rights.

HFDF has therefore watched with concern as thousands of data centers have been built or expanded in the last several years across the country to facilitate the biggest growth industry in the economy, the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. This growth is in no small part due to favorable subsidies and legislative gifts from all levels of government. It is difficult to fathom the sheer scale of the data center building spree, particularly when combined with the natural and financial resources being expended on its behalf.

At this moment, at least 700 data centers are under construction in the U.S., with another 900 in development about to break ground. Already, there are more than 4,500 data centers active, consuming a larger and larger share of electricity while delivering only dubious and vague benefits. For example in Virginia, which is still seeing a boom in data center construction, roughly 25% of the power consumption in the state comes from data centers, indicating the sheer scale of this trend.

A data center’s lifespan only lasts 10-15 years, which means these centers will be continually serviced, frequently expanded or even abandoned, and much of the expense will continue to fall on the public’s shoulders, and on our shared natural resources.

No other country has anything close to the number of data centers already running in the US, so fear-mongering about Chinese data dominance is wildly misplaced (they have less than 8% of our data center capacity). Nor are data centers a natural, self-sustaining economic development. Outside of the explicitly war-making and surveillance AI companies like Palantir (which themselves largely depend on government contracts) the sector is famously unable to turn a profit, is massively subsidized by circular financing schemes, and relies heavily on continued, out-of-control growth to survive. Making matters worse, the AIs themselves reportedly have developed a troublesome self-preservation instinct that may make shutting them down difficult, should humans choose to do so.

Why is HFDF Concerned?

In two important ways, Americans’ health and medical freedom are impacted by the unprecedented wave of data center construction. The first and most obvious category includes health harms to the population because of the construction and running of these massive data centers, as well as the economic pain imposed on Americans to subsidize them.

Secondly and more perniciously, these heavily taxpayer-subsidized data centers form the underlying computing architecture of unaccountable data control and management, which has critical implications for health autonomy, privacy, and the nature of government and corporate control over our lives and our medical choices. So taxpayers are effectively footing the bill for a tool that will likely be used to control the them.

Direct Harms to the Population

It should come as no surprise, that after years of being told that AI will be replacing or making redundant millions of Americans’ jobs, these same people are not particularly excited to undergo hardships to pave the way for that happening. They are not excited to have their local wilderness areas torn apart, water tables destroyed or plundered (with water sold to companies at lower rates than the locals receive), and to be surrounded by endless noise and bright light depriving them of sleep, all to speed up the destruction of their own livelihoods.

The economic displacement can be even more immediate than lost jobs and higher water bills. Thanks to AI-friendly legislative measures, the data centers can share the transmission costs with local residents, who in effect subsidize the mega-corporations’ energy costs. To boot, data center construction and their required expansive power grids, often involve the seizure of private homes, farms, and businesses in the name of “economic progress” via eminent domain. More and more cases of this have been gaining attention as the building boom gains momentum.

The required power infrastructure expansion in residential areas carries its own risks, particularly for childhood leukemia. Moreover, no matter how many scientists (mostly funded by the corporations themselves) reassure the population that there is low health effect from huge outputs of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation, the public doesn’t seem to want to live next to such facilities. Discomfort with nearby data centers is felt by a strong majority of the population—71% of polled Americans in a recent Gallup Poll are opposed to a data center being built in their area (for context, far fewer of those polled, at 53%, opposed a nuclear power plant being built close by).

Architecture of Control, Erosion of Privacy

In effect, the American people are being asked to see their natural and financial resources depleted for AI companies’ shareholders’ enrichment, as they accumulate the processing power required to scale up a surveillance grid that the population never asked for.

Last year, the White House, in one of its more dubious health policy announcements, openly outlined how Americans’ health data will be consolidated for governmental and corporate use (a “public private partnership” approach that includes CMS data) in the “Make Health Technology Great Again” initiative. This raised the specter of combining and potentially monetizing previously confidential health information, including doctors notes including prescription or private discussions on sensitive health topics.

Before that, the events of the previous half-decade have shown that the government and corporations were very quick to use and abuse technology to “track and trace” the population with little regard for privacy or even effectiveness of these tools, always in the name of public health. Indeed, the declaration of a health emergency and the imposition of emergency health laws like the PREP Act, still in force for Covid-19) was clearly seen as an excuse to violate individual rights and move more care into the digital “telehealth” realm in the name of alleged safety, all in a liability-free environment for emergency “countermeasures”. Our medical information, location, contacts, proximity to others, and assembly in groups was tracked and traced by “innovative” apps installed on smart phones, and if not for key legal setbacks against mandates and forced measures, those apps likely would have been used to implement a digital vaccine passport as was rolled out in Europe and less successfully in some parts of the United States.

But the urge to treat the population like a herd of animals seems to transcend temporary emergencies—the impulse among the powerful to track, analyze, monetize, report, predict, manipulate, and ultimately control human behavior is here to stay, even when the public is not frightened into an emergency mindset by media hysterics. The technology to collect and analyze biometrics (facial recognition, iris patterns, gait recognition, etc.) in real time has been facilitated by the rise in computing power for surveillance, monitoring, and AI analysis, which can only continue to grow if data centers continue to be built, and cameras are continually installed in public places. As usual, the surveillance infrastructure is claimed to be built for public safety, but leaks reveal that the companies that run these camera networks plan to sell the data to commercial brokers for individualized, for-profit tracking of citizens. Furthermore, there have already been numerous incidents of unlawful use of the data by law enforcement itself.

Collection and combination of health data has also transformed in recent years in a more general sense. The American health care system in its current beleaguered state is shifting toward “big data” approach, with population-scale health databases being constructed from the consolidating hospital groups and reference networks. This will logically be paired with digital identity systems based on the national REAL ID framework, contact-tracing platforms, location analytics, and even mental health behavioral prediction models being used in unison, driving the need for more and more processing power to allow these tools to mesh together and share personal-level data.

Thankfully, some legislation, regulation, and local control is emerging in each state, but this must be accelerated one town, county, and state at a time. Unless the public can reassert its will on the government and private economic elites on this issue, and slows down the runaway consolidation of information and absurd processing power, the coming years will be a critical turning point. These resource-draining data centers will provide the backbone for a high-tech fusion of digital ID, digital programmable currencies, electronic health records, insurance information, financial and social credit scores, as well as real-time personal behavior and tracking services affording government unimaginable power over individuals and their lives. No doubt the information will also likely be for sale to the highest bidder.

In the future, we can be sure that those in governmental or corporate positions of power would have far easier access to this data about the average American, than the other way around. But if we educate our fellow citizens about the issue, we can win back control of our destiny, one conversation at a time.